In addition, the center-left government announced that the cell phone of the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, was also spied on with the Israeli program Pegasus, as were those of Sánchez and Robles herself, after concluding the examination of the devices of all the members of the Executive.
The “Pegasus case” -for which the Catalan independence movement, key to the parliamentary stability of the socialist government, had demanded resignations- thus claims the first great victim.
Paz Esteban, 64, a graduate in Philosophy and Letters and a specialist in Ancient and Medieval History, became in 2020 the first woman to lead the intelligence services, for whom she began working almost 40 years ago.
questions
It is still unknown who spied on the Government and the Catalan separatists. According to what emerged from a meeting of a parliamentary commission, the CNI admitted having monitored 18 regional leaders with a court order, including the Catalan president Père Aragonés, but not the 65 that this movement speaks of.
The Secretary of State for Defense, Esperanza Casteleiro, will replace Esteban as head of the CNI, Robles announced.
Esteban’s dismissal outraged the opposition and did not placate the Catalan separatists. “It’s not enough,” Patricia Plaja, spokesperson for the Catalan government, told the press that she also called for Robles’ departure.
“Sánchez consumes the grotesque and offers the head of the director of the CNI to the independentists, once again weakening the state to seek its survival,” Alberto Núñez Feijóo, leader of the first opposition party, the conservative Popular Party, said on Twitter.
Disappointment
Esteban’s explanations last Thursday before a parliamentary commission did not convince the parliamentary allies of the Government, the extreme left and the Catalan and Basque independence supporters.
The scandal broke out earlier, on April 18, when the Canadian organization Citizen Lab identified more than 60 people from the Catalan separatist orbit whose mobile phones would have been infected between 2017 and 2020 with the Israeli Pegasus espionage software.
Pegasus, which allows remote access to data or activation of a phone’s cameras and microphones, and the Israeli company that created it, NSO, have come under fire after a media group revealed last year that the software was used to spy on to hundreds of politicians, journalists, human rights activists and businessmen around the world.
Source: Ambito
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